How to Optimize an Article for SEO

If you dedicate yourself professionally to SEO positioning or you want to improve the visibility of your website in the main search engines, you are interested in continuing to read this article. In it we will see how to get your blog posts to be positioned by one or more keywords in the top positions of Google quickly. 

With this, we will be able to attract quality traffic. Being understood by such, those visits that offer us more possibilities to generate conversions.

Points Discussed in This Article:

1 Decide which keyword is to be optimized.
2 Some SEO terms that you may not know
3 10 aspects that will help you write an SEO article
4 Essential tools to optimize an SEO article.
5 Important aspects when optimizing images
6 How to make it known so that it positions itself quickly.

DECIDE WHICH KEYWORD YOUR POST/PAGE IS TO BE OPTIMIZED

Before starting to write the post, we have to determine what keyword we intend to position.

The first point of SEO optimization is to perform an audit of the keywords that best define the service or product offered by our website or e-commerce. At this point, we will know which are the best-positioned keywords on our website, the ones that generate the most traffic, their trend and we will determine which are the keywords that can attract the most traffic to our site.

After analyzing this point, in the blog content strategy, we will define what are the keywords that we will work on in each article, according to our SEO positioning objectives.

Before continuing with the aspects to take into account, it is necessary to install the Yoast SEO plugin in our WordPress. At the end of this article, I explain why. In addition, I will mention other plugins that will help us check if we have really done a good job of SEO optimization on-page of our website.

Optimize YOUR SEO Article For SOME SEO TERMS YOU MAY NOT KNOW

Slug. This term, typical of WordPress, refers to the title of the article where blanks have been replaced by hyphens.

Friendly URL. A friendly URL is one that has a clean structure of stop words or other types of characters or numbers. For example,

https://orderherbaproducts.goherbalife.com/Catalog/Home/Index/en-IN/

OR
https://professionalwebsitedesignservi.splashthat.com/

 OR

http://bestdevelopersmumbai.wikidot.com

OR

https://mumbaibdcny.page.tl/  

Stop words. They are those words that do not add value to the friendly url, for example, articles, prepositions, conjunctions, etc. Seekers ignore them.

Long Tail Keywords. They are the keywords with less competition but that will bring us a higher quality traffic, for example, "buy cheap microwave online", compared to the keyword "microwave".

H1, H2, H3 headings. They are the way to tell Google what the content of our page is about and what its hierarchy is based on its importance.

10 ASPECTS THAT WILL HELP YOU WRITE AN SEO ARTICLE

The title is the hook of any article. But in addition to knowing how to capture the interest of potential readers, it is important that the keyword we are working on appears in it, and if possible, at first. Its length must be approximately 70 characters. As we will see at the end, Yoast SEO will tell us if we have the optimized title or not.

The meta description. A good meta description will help improve the CTR of the ranked keyword, or what is the same, the chances of people clicking on your content. And this will enhance the visibility of the indexed entry. In addition, it should contain the keyword, preferably at the beginning. And its ideal length is 150 characters.

An attractive meta description will make users easily click on our results.

The url of the post. It must be short, friendly, and without words "stop". Whenever possible, it will include the term we are working on. Typically, the URL or slug are the words in the title separated by hyphens except for prepositions, articles, or other words that do not contribute.

The extension. It is said that the more extensive the better. True, but not entirely. The important thing, beyond the number of words, is the quality and originality of the post. That provides relevant, useful, and novel information for readers. And most importantly, that it is always your own content. No copying and pasting of foreign content. This, as we have seen in other articles, are prohibited practices.

The first and last paragraphs are key. Both at the beginning of the post and at its closure, it is important that the keywords are present, but changing their wording. That is, using synonyms, plurals,  long-tail keywords, etc. For example, if we are going to position “Valencia apartment rentals”, we can use terms such as “Valencia apartment rentals”, “vacation apartment rentals”, etc. in the newsroom.

The structure of the article. The content of the article must be hierarchized and structured by heading labels where the keywords also appear.

The heading tags H1, H2, H3 ... will mark the importance of the content in the eyes of Google. There must be no more than one H1 in an article. This, in most templates, is the title of the post. The H2 usually define the sections of the post, so it will be common to define several, and the H3 or H4, the subsections. It is not highly recommended or necessary to work more labels (H5, H6 ...).
Internal and external links. It is important that from the article itself links to other articles with which there is a thematic relationship or the categories of the blog or the online store that you want to promote. It is also desirable that links to external sources - other pages - of greater authority. In this case, better define the link as nofollow.

An optimal internal link structure is essential to improve SEO positioning.

Optimized multimedia content . Don't forget to add embedded images, infographics and videos to your article published on Youtube. These must be SEO optimized. How are they optimized? How to optimize a video for SEO  will be a topic that I will cover in another post. As for how to do the same with an image, in this same post you will get the answer.

Keyword density. Do not SPAM. How many times does the keyword have to be repeated throughout the article? Very simple, the moment you wonder if you are going, it is that you are doing it. Their presence must be natural, justified in the narration of the text. Thanks to the SEOquake tool we will be able to know the density of each word. My recommendation is that the density does not exceed 2%.

ESSENTIAL TOOLS TO OPTIMIZE AN SEO ARTICLE

SEO Yoast. The most famous and essential SEO plugin if you want to start optimizing your website. But beware, installing this plugin in a wordpress does not mean that the website is optimized for SEO. It is only the first step. This plugin will help you know if your post is optimized. And if not, it will tell you what you have to improve.

SEOquake. It is a free extension that you can install in your browser and that allows you to analyze the factors on page of your page and those of the competition. Yes, what you read! You will be able to know if your article is optimized based on the parameters that we have been commenting, do the same with posts from other websites that you are interested in analyzing.

Xovi Suite . Without a doubt, the most complete SEO tool I know. In addition to helping you carry out audits, it will help you to know what factors on page you should improve on your website.

IMPORTANT ASPECTS WHEN OPTIMIZING IMAGES

The size of the image. It must be the minimum possible. My advice, before uploading the image, edit it with Photoshop or any other image editing program, and save it in web version at the pixel size you really need and with the quality necessary to make it look good enough. If it is oversized it will slow down the load time and this will harm SEO and user experience.

The name of the file. Forget uploading the file with names like IMG_989.jpg. Modify it so that it describes the image. For example, if it is the photo of a squid sandwich, the file is called "sandwich-squid.jpg".

The alt attribute or alternative text.  It is the way to indicate the content of the photo to the Google spider. All images on our website must have the optimized alt attribute. To do this, simply indicate it in the image's HTML code, being descriptive, concise and with a keyword .
The caption . This will help us contextualize the image and improve its positioning in Google Images.

HOW TO MAKE IT KNOWN SO THAT IT POSITIONS ITSELF QUICKLY

Viralize content in rrssOnce optimized and published, it is key to make it known to as many readers as possible so that search engines take it into account and index it quickly. For this, we can use different tools, which, I will comment.

Dissemination on social networks. If you have a wide community of users around your blog or web on social networks, visualize it through your social profiles. Your own followers will help you spread it.

Send it to the list of subscribers to your blog.  Those who have subscribed to your newsletter are real users very interested in the content you generate. Don't let them down. Create value content and they will reward you.

Plan a campaign on Facebook Ads. To publicize your article and, why not say it, your personal brand to new readers, it is advisable to plan an advertising campaign on Facebook Ads.

Subscription. Years ago, it was possible to subscribe to the contents of a blog thanks to Google Reader. He disappeared from our lives but his space was replaced by Feedly, an excellent tool for subscribers.

Article aggregators. It is also important to publicize your content in content aggregators. Some of the best known are menéame, logs, mktfan or report me.

While writing the article, I have optimized it following point by point all the commented aspects. So, I hope it will be indexed soon as a search result for “How to Optimize an Article for SEO”. If you want to help me achieve it, you may as well share it on your social networks or leave a comment. It all adds up. And so, more people will know how to improve the search engine positioning of their website.